Present day internal combustion engines are generally of the reciprocatory type utilizing one or more reciprocating pistons connected by a crankshaft to a drive shaft, or of the rotary type such as the Wankel engine which utilizes an eccentric rotor rotatably mounted in a housing chamber, or of the jet engine type wherein combustion takes place in one or more fixed combustion chambers to provide a thrust which can be used directly or which can be used to drive a turbine power take-off.
The reciprocatory engine and the Wankel engine have several disadvantages. They are plagued with high friction which generates useless heat and thus wastes energy and fuel. Moreover, being constricted to the use of the same volume for the expansion of gas during combustion as for the compression of gas prior to combustion, they are limited in the efficient use of fuel. The Wankel engines can produce only one power pulse per revolution per rotor and the reciprocatory engines can normally produce only one power pulse every other revolution per piston, and therefore, multiple pistons or rotors are required. In addition, both types of engines require the use of highly refined fuels to retard the combustion rate because both types of engines are limited to a low rate of gas expansion. Also, all of these prior art type engines must use excessive power to exhaust the burned gases, and the reciprocating and Wankel type engines rely greatly on a vacuum or an external power source to obtain good volumetric efficiency in supplying the fuel to the combustion chambers.